Enrique Martínez Celaya – The Practice at Whale and Star

by Juliana Accioly

Enrique Martínez Celaya, a visual artist whose work is associated with the nature of human experience and the search for meaning that dominates so many contemporary societies, was a late bloomer. His interest in artistic expression began in his childhood, but art did not become his profession until well into his twenties. Painting was the starting point of his career, whose possibilities and limits he quickly expanded, crossing traditionally pictorial boundaries into other media like sculpture, installation, and photography. Set in the transient world of time and memory, identity and displacement, Martínez Celaya’s work embodies his belief that being a certain kind of artist means being a certain kind of person and that in and through art one gains clarity about himself and his relationship to the world.